Something I have noticed, when I work with other businesses, or just see someone who has a business that is floundering, is that the first instinct of the business owner is to focus on the marketing as the solution to the problems the business has. I saw this a lot back when I did social media consulting. People would grab onto social media like it was the last piece of grass on a cliff and somehow hope it would solve the problems of their business, when what was really needed was much deeper and more substantive changes applied to the business at large.
Marketing is a problem that a lot of businesses have. Marketing is also an important facet of business, but its not the end all of business, and yet often it is treated that way because so many people struggle with it. It’s as if they have this idea that if they can just get their marketing down, all their other problems will be solved. Marketing doesn’t come easily to many people and trying to get the marketing message out without losing the interest of people is tricky. However, marketing isn’t the only kind of problem a business, and more often than not its not the biggest problem a business has.
A good case in point comes to mind about an acquaintance who had marketing problems, but also had problems with prioritizing what needed to be done to run the business, how to organize his/her time working on the business, and a variety of other issues. S/he got help from a marketing consultant, which fixed the marketing problem, but didn’t fix all the other problems in the business. The marketing consultant couldn’t fix those problems with marketing because marketing is about the message of the business, as opposed to the organization and processes of the business. As a result, although the acquaintance had better marketing, the other problems got worse, because the marketing brought more customers in, and also revealed the flaws of the business in more depth by the person’s inability to fully engage with the new customers.
I’d argue that if you find marketing to be an issue, it can also be indicative of deeper issues in the business. So while hiring a marketing consultant can be useful for addressing the issue of marketing, doing some digging into your business is also important and may require skills that a marketing consultant doesn’t have. Marketing isn’t a band aid solution and shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s a solution that needs to be mindfully applied to your business in conjunction with other solutions that also provide resolutions to issues effecting the business in ways marketing can’t address on its own.